Ban fails to stop Myanmar timber
Monday, July 16, 2007
ENVIRONMENTALISTS in Myanmar have expressed their shock at seeing mountains of logs being transported on trucks across the border into China despite efforts to halt the trade to save the country's forests from total destruction.
"I was shocked to see mountains of logs and big timber trucks" heading from Laiza into China, the spokeswoman for one local environment group, the Pan Kachin Development Society (PKDS), said. On condition that she not be named, she told AFP she had counted up to 80 trucks crossing the border each day during a visit to the town in April. Stacks of teak, tamalan and other woods lined the roads waiting to go, she said.
The trade endures despite China's efforts to stop it because of a complex mix of interests. For Myanmar's junta, timber is one of its major sources of desperately needed foreign currency. Two main ethnic Kachin groups who have partial control over the region also see the timber trade as a key source of income and have shown varying degrees of willingness to stop it.
Local Chinese authorities along the border have not consistently enforced the year-old ban, creating pockets where timber still flows across the border. Laiza, a village about 1,000 km north of Yangon, is a significant trading town, especially for timber which once flowed freely across the border about 160 km away to feed China's insatiable appetite for raw materials.
Some 1.5 million cubic metres of timber worth US$350 million was exported from Myanmar to China in 2005, most of it illegal, according to Britain-based forestry watchdog Global Witness.
That was a 12 percent gain over the amount of timber shipped to China the year before, and roughly double the amount exported in 2000, Global Witness said. China, which has imposed stiff limits on logging in its own forests amid fears of deforestation, uses the wood to supply its construction boom and its soaring exports of wooden furniture.
But in the face of international pressure that followed the Global Witness report, China decided to officially close its borders to Myanmar's timber. Global Witness said one of its teams spent a couple weeks on the border in April, and they believed the ban has had a major effect on the Chinese side, although some problems remain.
With scant data from Myanmar's government, environmental groups analyse Chinese import and logging data to estimate the size of the trade, but no precise data has been made available since the ban took effect last year.
At government level China appeared to be genuinely working at shutting down the illicit trade, but those efforts had been hampered by Chinese companies fiddling with their quotas or hunting for loopholes in the ban. AFP
"I was shocked to see mountains of logs and big timber trucks" heading from Laiza into China, the spokeswoman for one local environment group, the Pan Kachin Development Society (PKDS), said. On condition that she not be named, she told AFP she had counted up to 80 trucks crossing the border each day during a visit to the town in April. Stacks of teak, tamalan and other woods lined the roads waiting to go, she said.
The trade endures despite China's efforts to stop it because of a complex mix of interests. For Myanmar's junta, timber is one of its major sources of desperately needed foreign currency. Two main ethnic Kachin groups who have partial control over the region also see the timber trade as a key source of income and have shown varying degrees of willingness to stop it.
Local Chinese authorities along the border have not consistently enforced the year-old ban, creating pockets where timber still flows across the border. Laiza, a village about 1,000 km north of Yangon, is a significant trading town, especially for timber which once flowed freely across the border about 160 km away to feed China's insatiable appetite for raw materials.
Some 1.5 million cubic metres of timber worth US$350 million was exported from Myanmar to China in 2005, most of it illegal, according to Britain-based forestry watchdog Global Witness.
That was a 12 percent gain over the amount of timber shipped to China the year before, and roughly double the amount exported in 2000, Global Witness said. China, which has imposed stiff limits on logging in its own forests amid fears of deforestation, uses the wood to supply its construction boom and its soaring exports of wooden furniture.
But in the face of international pressure that followed the Global Witness report, China decided to officially close its borders to Myanmar's timber. Global Witness said one of its teams spent a couple weeks on the border in April, and they believed the ban has had a major effect on the Chinese side, although some problems remain.
With scant data from Myanmar's government, environmental groups analyse Chinese import and logging data to estimate the size of the trade, but no precise data has been made available since the ban took effect last year.
At government level China appeared to be genuinely working at shutting down the illicit trade, but those efforts had been hampered by Chinese companies fiddling with their quotas or hunting for loopholes in the ban. AFP
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